Members

The Members button is where you can view your member details, and adjust the settings of your member levels and groups. This is primarily a place for administration, but there are a few settings in here that you can modify for the most profitable results.

Member Management

It's possible to search through your members on many different criteria. The most valuable way you can group them is by Member Level. In the Member Management area you'll find an option to email all of your members within any specific level.

The obvious use for this is to avoid sending upgrade invitations to members that have already upgraded, but there is a more compelling reason to send specific emails to specific member levels: the member level teaches you something useful about every single member. I'm not talking about taking this to ridiculous lengths and building up lengthy profiles for every member level, but there are a number of facts that you can assert and assumptions that you can extrapolate.


Upgraded Members
These people are:

# Willing to spend money on their business.
# Willing to spend money with you.
# In one transaction, willing to spend AT LEAST whatever your upgrade costs.
# Interested in the niche topic of your membership site.

From this information, you can make the reasonable assumption that many of those members will, if presented with the right offer, spend money with you again. The offer could be more of your products, or it could be a related product of which you are an affiliate. Additionally, because they've already spent money with you, you have a legitimate reason to offer them a 'VIP Members' discount or bonus.

Free Members
These people are:

' Willing to hand over their email address in exchange for something.
' Interested in the niche topic of your membership site.

It would be easy to assume that free members are just 'tire-kickers' who aren't willing to spend money. In some cases this will be true, but it may simply be that your offer wasn't quite right for them. If you assume that at least some of them ARE willing to spend money, then you just need to find the right offer.

' It may be that they can't afford your initial offers. Try pitching something at a lower price than your downsell.
' Maybe your offer was similar to something they already have. Try different products within your niche.
' Perhaps your offer sounded too much like hard work. It could be that they don't want to learn how to do something, but they'd be willing to pay for someone to do it for them. Create a service that fills this need.
' It could be that YOU are the deal-breaker. Whatever the reason, don't take it personally. Instead, become an affiliate for someone else's product and pitch this. Concentrate on offers that are free on the front-end and then pitch an upsell. At least you can be sure that your free members are willing to complete the first part of the equation.

If you really want to take the guesswork out of your offers, send a questionnaire to your members and find out exactly why they didn't take your offer and what they would be willing to say 'yes' to. Make sure you offer a reward for completing the questionnaire. The reward should be something worthwhile, otherwise you won't get enough completed questionnaires to provide you with useable data.

Whatever reward you offer to your free members, make sure you include, as an unadvertised bonus, a discount on one of your products. You may still be able to bring some of your free members into your upgraded members level.


Member Levels

Creating the various levels for your members (free, paid, upsell, etc) is a straightforward process, but the last four options are frequently misunderstood, and offer you some extremely valuable opportunities. I would go as far as to say that this quartet has the power to give you more additional sales than any other feature. In this section I'm going to give you some specific uses, but with a little imagination you can take this much, much further.



Visible: Y or N
This may sound like an odd question. Why would you want to create a members level and then make it invisible? There are many reasons'

As an example, let's say you have a free level, and two upgraded levels. If you make all three visible, they will be selectable from a drop-down menu on your member registration page. You want your customers to be able to choose between these three member levels, so this is fine. But what if you have a member level that you DON'T want new customers to see? Then you set the Visible field as N, and this member level will NOT show on the member registration page.

Member levels that are customised in this way can only be accessed as an upgrade for existing members, or via a private registration page at a secret URL. There are many reasons why you might want to do this. Here are just a few of them:

Upsell/Downsell Member Levels
You don't want new members to know, in advance, that there will be an upsell and downsell opportunity, especially if you're setting them as One-Time-Offers. By making these member levels invisible, you can offer them to existing members as upgrade, but keep them private from newly registered members.

Joint Venture Partners
Encourage affiliate activity by creating a free Joint Venture Partner member level, that is only accessible via a private registration page. You can utilise this to allow JV partners the opportunity to preview your content, and to offer them a preferential affiliate commission percentage.

Special Offers
Imagine you've made a deal with a heavyweight affiliate to offer their readers a special discounted rate. To facilitate this, create the special member level, and make it invisible. Provide your affiliate with the secret registration URL and you can offer this unique registration option without the whole world knowing that there is a discounted level available.

This one option, visible or invisible, opens up all manner of possibilities. Create a special members level and keep it private for you and your selected audience.


Tier 2
Some are put off by a 'Tier 2' option, confusing it with Multi-level Marketing, or some of the shadier 'make money online' programs. In reality, this set of three options is designed to allow you to encourage referral and affiliate activity.

In practice, this means that, if one of your affiliates refers a new member, and THAT new member becomes an affiliate, your original affiliate gets a small cut of the latter affiliate's sales. Let me make it clear:

You set your main referral percentage to 50% and your 'Tier 2' sales at 10%.

Tom refers Dick
= Tom receives 50% of the sale.

Dick refers Harry
= Dick receives 50% of the sale AND Tom receives 10% of the sale.

The percentage values can be set to any percentage you like; although I don't recommend the combined percentages adding up to more than 100% or you will be losing money on some sales. This is fine if you have the back-end sales weight to counter this, otherwise, I suggest keeping the combined total below 80%. This provides a good level of reward for you AND your affiliates.

Many of your customers won't appreciate the value of a 'Tier 2' opportunity, but they aren't your target here. The people you want to utilise 'Tier 2' are the super affiliates who have the ability to refer lots of new members; they will be very quick to see the advantage here. You may even prefer to keep 'Tier 2' exclusive for your Joint Venture partners, making this one of the tasty incentives for your trusted affiliates.

Another way to raise the profile of this feature is to offer it privately to your best affiliates. Create a new member level with a 'Tier 2' percentage, upgrade your top affiliates, and then privately email each affiliate and tell them about the 'Tier 2' opportunity they now have available to them. You've just given them a really good reason to step up their affiliate activity even further.

Last, but not least, you can use 'Tier 2' to create a special 'JV Broker' level. This is a members level that is specifically designed for individuals who can attract new affiliates for you. If you ask around, you'll find that there are individuals who specifically market themselves as a JV Broker ' usually because they have access to many individuals with large mailing lists. Their usual practice is to act as a JV Broker for a person, in exchange for a 10-20% 'Tier 2' facility. Be aware however, that JV Brokers are usually very selective. They'll need to be confident in the ability of your offers to convert before they are willing to work for you.

A similar, but easier way to obtain a JV Broker, is to advertise for one on Elance, or another outsourcing website. There are people out there who will work to find affiliates for you, purely for the 'Tier 2' perks. Because they only get paid when you get paid, this is a very cost-effective approach. Some outsourcing sites don't permit the hiring of people on a commission-only basis, but you can get round this by offers a small 'signing-on' bonus; an initial payment to get them started.

I fully understand if you're feeling some reluctance about giving away so much of your profits. It's easy to focus on the fact that your affiliates, combined, are getting even more from each sale than you are. I understand this reluctance but I'm still going to tell you get over yourself. Remember, these are sales you WOULDN'T have received at all without the activity of your 'Tier 1' affiliates. This is profit you would never have had in the first place. Don't look at the 50-80% you're giving away, look at the 20-50% you get to keep. And this is before you factor in any future and back-end sales that you may make with these new referrals.


Signup Settings

This page gives you line-by-line control of your member registration page. For the most part this is where you decide what information you want your members to hand over and which of these fields are going to be mandatory. Administration is simple, but don't underestimate the importance of this page. It's possible to write a killer sales page, only to lose half your interested customers on the registration page. And that's not all; it's even possible to customise this page in a way that increases your sales on subsequent pages.

In other words, pay careful attention to this section!

You can test this out for yourself but, generally speaking:

The fewer pieces of information you ask for, the greater the percentage of customers that will complete the form.

You can get away with a few more questions if the customer is buying something from you, as opposed to registering for something free.

Figure out the absolute minimum information that you need for someone to sign up, and go with that. This will probably be first name, last name and email address. If you want more information than this, don't clutter your registration page unnecessarily, ask for it AFTER the member has validated their registration.

It's fairly common practice to open the Members Home page with a list of step-by-step instructions. We're conditioned to pay attention to these lists and the majority of people will follow the majority of your steps, even if one of those steps is: Please complete your 'Profile' page. That's your opportunity to get the rest of the data you desire.

We'll cover step lists in more detail later on but, for now, just remember to put the most important steps at the beginning of the list.

PayPal Email & Clickbank ID

The majority of the fields are self-explanatory except, perhaps, for the "PayPal Email" and "Clickbank ID". These fields are provided so you can automatically make your members affiliates. The LFM script, as a matter of course, provides all members with a unique referral link so affiliate-minded individuals can get started straight away. If you're using Clickbank to manage your payment system, you MUST get the users 'Clickbank ID' for the affiliate program to function. If you're not using Clickbank, then 'PayPal Email' is sufficient. You can even ask for the 'PayPal Email' at a later period if you're concerned about using too many fields on your registration page.

If you find your members are reluctant to provide their email address, then add some text to your registration or member page, explaining that this is purely so that you know where to send their commissions. The idea of receiving money, strangely enough, seems to be a good incentive to get members to do' well, just about anything.


Check Box
This field allows you to ask the customer any question you want, and they can then check the box to say 'yes', or leave it blank to say 'no'. You can use this to survey your customers on just about anything:

' Would they recommend you to a friend?
' Did they find you via a search engine?
' Would they be interested in a 1-on-1 coaching program?

Don't use it for the sake of it, but this really opens up a lot of possibilities.

My favourite use of this feature is a technique I call the 'Phantom Check Box'. It's efficacy depends on people not knowing about this technique so, although I can't stop you, please do your best to keep this one to yourself.

As you've probably realised, the check box doesn't perform any function, other than recording the customer's decision on whatever question you're asking. The thing is, your customer DOESN'T know that the check box is static. As far as they're concerned it could have a profound impact on their membership. It all depends on WHAT you ask, and HOW you ask it.

The text that I like to use says:

"Please send me information on how I can upgrade my membership"

Sounds innocent enough, right? With that check box in place, you're well placed to find out what percentage of your customers are interested in your upgrade. But there's more to it than that. In the customer's mind, if they check this box, they're going to receive additional information when, in fact, everyone is going to receive this information on your one-time-offer page, whether they check the box or not. The result? Everyone that checks the box will pay more than the usual attention to your offer because they're expecting it, and also because they ASKED to see it.

Dishonest? Me? Far from it! I'm going to show everyone my one-time-offer whether they're interested or not. All this checkbox really does is give the customer a nudge to let them know there is an upgrade opportunity on its way. I'm effectively priming the customer so they're in the right frame of mind to see my offer.

Adding a Phantom Check Box takes less than a minute, but it can have a sizeable effect on the conversion rate of your offer.


Incomplete Signups

This page is simply a search facility for customers that got half-way through the registration process and then, for whatever reason, didn't complete it. This most commonly happens with paid membership sites when someone completes the registration page, but doesn't complete the payment process. Sometimes this is because the customer changed their mind at the last minute, but this also occurs if there was some kind of error with the payment processing stage.

Rather than leaving no trace of their activity, the LFM script records the registration, but leaves in a 'pending' state to be either removed or completed at a later date.

Don't fall asleep, this is useful stuff. These may seem like dead-end accounts, but there is a way to squeeze some extra profit out of them. A lot of people who fail to complete the registration process, especially if it was due to a payment processing error, will still try and log-in. Rather than refusing them, the LFM script will allow the user to log-in and, by default, will show them a blank screen. The technique I advise here is to replace the blank screen with an apology and a payment button.

Commiserate with the user that something went wrong, and instruct them on how to complete their payment to fully activate their account. You can increase the effectiveness of this page by offering a small discount on the regular price, as a courtesy for the inconvenience.

Every one that converts is a sale you would have had zero chance of receiving if you hadn't set up this page. Remember, every unused feature reduces your overall profits. Put another way, every feature you use increases your overall profits.





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